John Adams - The crisis with france

In an era of peace, a president with Adams' view of the office
might have enjoyed a tranquil four years. He did not regard his election
by a margin of three votes as a mandate from the American people but only
as a duty to be performed. He had no program for the nation other than the
"continuance in all its energy" of the government under the
Constitution. "What other form of government, indeed, can so well
deserve our esteem and love?" he queried in his short inaugural
address, which stressed his dedication to the principles upon which the
American governments were founded. But the presidency of John Adams was
dominated not by tranquillity but by a single issue that threatened to
destroy the Union before the end of its first decade. It was fortunate for
the nation—and for Adams' claim to presidential
great-ness—that this single issue concerned foreign policy, the
area in which the president had the most independent authority and the one
for which Adams was best prepared by experience.

The course of the French Revolution since 1789 had plunged Europe into
war. Despite President Washington's policy of official neutrality,
Americans increasingly divided over whether to remain loyal to their ally
in the War of Independence or to support the British effort to prevent
French domination of all Europe. The leaders of republican France saw in
the treaty that John Jay had negotiated with Great Britain in 1794 not
only shameful ingratitude for their country's aid to the struggling
colonies during the American Revolution but also a de facto alliance with
Great Britain that repudiated the Franco-American alliance of 1778. The
treaty became the main issue in the election of 1796 as the Republicans
generally denounced it. On the eve of the election, the French minister to
the United States, Pierre Auguste Adet, openly acknowledged his
government's support for Jefferson. At his inauguration Adams
declared his "personal esteem for the French nation" and his
determination to maintain "neutrality and impartiality among the
belligerent powers of Europe." But already the Directory, the
five-man executive of the French republic, had interpreted Adams'
succession to the presidency as another act of hostility toward France.

Since 1795, French armed ships preying on American shipping, particularly
in the West Indies, had captured hundreds of vessels flying the flag of
the United States. On 2 March 1797, two days before the inauguration, the
Directory stepped up the maritime war by a decree that legitimized nearly
any seizure of an American ship and fell just short of a declaration of
war. Furthermore, the Directory had in effect broken off diplomatic
relations with the United States by refusing to accept Charles Cotes-worth
Pinckney as the replacement for James Monroe, the American minister to
France recalled by Washington for his opposition to Jay's Treaty.

As Adams took office, he had to pick up the pieces of Washington's
shattered neutrality policy. The first president was fortunate, thought
Jefferson, to have retired "just as the bubble is bursting."
Following three weeks of deliberation, Adams called a special session of
Congress for the middle of May. In a message to Congress on 16 May, he
denounced the Directory's slighting of Pinckney and honoring of the
departing Monroe as an attempt to "separate the people of the
United States" from their freely elected government. It was time to
convince France and the world that Americans could not be
"humiliated under a colonial spirit of fear and
inferiority." He pledged a "fresh attempt at
negotiations" and a willingness to correct any real wrong done
France. But in the meantime the nation must look to "effectual
measures of defense." He recommended the building of a navy as the
first line of defense and the expansion of the armed forces to protect the
long coastline against French raiding parties.

This address ended the brief period of political peace enjoyed by the
president. His inaugural address had been praised by even some Republican
leaders and editors, but now Jefferson concluded that Adams had been
captured by a circle of Federalists pushing for a war against France and
close ties with Great Britain. The Republican press generally denounced
the "gasconading speech" for exaggerating the danger of war
in order to achieve such sinister goals as deceiving the nation into
accepting a standing army that could be used to institute an American
monarchy. Yet even Hamilton favored another attempt at reconciliation and
so instructed his followers in the cabinet. Pickering, Wolcott, and
McHenry, more inclined to war than negotiation, gave way to Hamilton on
the sending of a peace commission but rejected his advice that it should
include a friend of France.

Adams, too, wanted to send a bipartisan commission to France. Ideally, he
thought, it should include either Jefferson or Madison. But both refused,
and there was growing opposition in the cabinet and among other
Federalists to sending any Republican. Finally, on 31 May 1797, the
president nominated a geographically balanced commission of Pinckney,
Francis Dana, and John Marshall. When Dana declined because of health,
Adams defied his cabinet by replacing Dana with Elbridge Gerry, a close
Massachusetts friend and a political independent. Following weeks of
heated debate, the special session adjourned on 8 July, after approving
the commission and passing some feeble defense measures.

Marshall and Gerry soon sailed to join Pinckney and attempted to open
negotiations, but no word could be expected from them for many months. The
president and Mrs. Adams left the capital in July for their home in
Quincy, Massachusetts, and did not return until November. Meanwhile the
debate raged in the press. Republican publications described in detail a
conspiracy of warmongers, while Federalist editors attacked the cowardly
American Jacobins for quivering in fear before insults to the
nation's honor by French atheists. The president's annual
message to Congress on 23 November added fuel to the flames. He held out
little hope of an immediate peace. Defense measures, he insisted, were now
more essential than before and should be supported as much as possible by
taxation rather than by loans.

With instructions that asked for much and gave little, the commissioners
had feeble bargaining power in France. They faced the new French foreign
minister, the wily Talleyrand, who, although more inclined to peace than
the Directory, saw the negotiations as an opportunity for personal gain.
Working through confidential agents, Talleyrand demanded, as preconditions
for negotiating, a bribe of £50,000 for himself and the assumption
by the United States of all American claims against France. Pinckney
answered the demand for a bribe with an emphatic "No, no, not a
sixpence." Meanwhile, Adams' speech of 16 May 1797 had
increased the Directory's anger over Jay's Treaty, and an
apology was demanded.

The commissioners continued in unofficial negotiations for another five
months. Their first report reached Adams on 4 March 1798. A shocked
president sent the one uncoded letter to Congress the next day, and his
anger rose as the others were deciphered. He asked his cabinet if he
should lay all the dispatches before Congress and then request a
declaration of war. Deciding not to go that far, on the nineteenth he
informed the legislature that the mission was hopeless and called for
strong defense measures.

Skeptical of the president's "warmongering,"
Republicans demanded to see the dispatches and in so doing fell into a
trap of their own making. After a formal request from the House, the
president released the papers on 3 April, substituting the letters
W
,
X
,
Y
,
Z
for the names of the agents who had delivered the request for a bribe.
News of the XYZ affair, as it became known, quickly spread throughout the
nation and aroused patriots to turn Pinckney's "No, no, not
a sixpence" into the toast "Millions for defense, but not
one cent for tribute!" Suddenly John Adams became, as his wife
proudly noticed, "wonderfully popular." She wrote her son
John Quincy Adams, the American minister to the court of Berlin, that the
supporters of France had received a "death wound."

President Adams judged that a declaration of war was inevitable, but he
was in no hurry to ask Congress for it. While some extreme, or High,
Federalists pressed for an immediate declaration, the majority in Congress
preferred to wait until further provocation from France united an
overwhelming majority of Americans behind a declared war. For several
months addresses and resolutions of support from communities and societies
all over the nation poured into the president's house. He gave much
of his time to answering each address in fervid language, calling for
patriotic sacrifice and reproaching the American friends of France.
Published in the newspapers and in part as
A Selection of the Patriotic Addresses, to the President of the United
States
, these addresses and replies inflamed the passion for war. Federalists
now flaunted the black cockade of the American Revolution to shame those
Republicans who sometimes wore the tricolor cockade of the French
revolutionaries. From pulpit and press, rabid Federalists spread the fear
of a worldwide conspiracy, hatched in France, against Christianity and
political freedom. Rumors of impending French raids and even a full-scale
invasion alarmed the unprotected coastal towns.